Oh Susanna, Camptown Races, Swanee River, Old Kentucky Home and a bunch of other American songs considered now to be of the folk genre have this unfortunate origin. Do you think its in poor taste to listen to these because of their bleak origin, or are the songs changed enough that nowadays it’s fine? I certainly lean towards the former, but I wanna know what y’all think.
19 comments
Remove a portion of American history from my listening habbits?
Nah.
Im gonna be honest none of these songs are on my daily rotation, but no it wouldnt be in bad taste imo. Just odd.
Absolutely not.
Definitely in poor taste to replicate the old style of performing in blackface as anything but a strict historical reenactment.
But erase songs from history because of how some people performed them? That’s an insane degree of whitewashing and even worse, denying the songs any significance outside of a single aspect of a single era.
Banger is a banger.
Of all the reasons not to listen to that hokey stuff, the fact that long-dead racists may have written it is pretty far down the list.
Going to be honest, learning that “yellow rose of Texas” was a minstrel song was devastating
But it was “nice” to read that by the 50s famous singers decided to change the lyrics because even if they realized it might be not a great idea for them to sing the original lyrics
Out of curiosity, do they still teach these and similar songs in school? I learned them in music class…ahem… many years ago.
I’m not familiar with the other songs but I think it’s unfair to say that ‘My Kentucky Home, Good Night’ originated from blackface minstrels.
In fact, the actual origin of the song is quite the opposite. Stephen Foster, the author, was inspired to write the song by an abolitionist novel. It was meant to sympathize with slaves, not mock them. It was the people who misused the song after it was written who used it in minstrels, to no fault of the author.
Many prominent black abolitionists promoted the song, including Frederick Douglass. Douglass is one of the most important abolitionists of the era who escaped slavery himself. He said, “(My Kentucky Home) awakens sympathies for the slave, in which antislavery principles take root, grow, and flourish.” Just because some assholes later misrepresented the meaning of the song doesn’t make it racist or rooted in blackface minstrels.
Listen to the music you like. No one else’s opinion matters.
Considering that “My Old Kentucky Home” is played at every sports event in Kentucky, I don’t think it’s in poor taste.
I’ll answer this is an American folk musician.
Generally speaking, most audiences and musicians don’t find these songs in bad taste unless they are explicitly racist, and most performers who sing them just tweak the language if there is an explicitly racist part- as the popular recorded versions of Yellow Rose of Texas generally do, or as most musicians do with Shenandoah by omitting verses about trading a Native chief “firewater” to “steal his daughter”.
While you might find someone particularly tuned into these songs’ racist histories [advocating that they be removed from our musical repertoir,](https://gen.medium.com/dinah-put-down-your-horn-154b8d8db12a) most Americans are not even aware of the blackface origins of some of our most popular folk songs. Instead, these songs are not popular even among folk music circles, simply because they are seen as campy.
That is NOT to say that folk musicians never change the music to address concerns about racism, sexism, or other diversity. Our audiences are very frequently pretty left-wing, activist crowds who are super aware of diversity and language, especially if you’re a musician like me who frequently plays to labor events, benefit shows, activist meetings, etc. Some of these changes are common sense updates on really cringey original material, and some of the changes requested are…. frustrating, as a musician.
I’ve had a number of times when people in different activist groups have asked me to change old lyrics, especially around gender inclusion. For example when singing Joe Hill’s “There is power in a union”, I sing “lend a hand” instead of “be a man”. It also has the lyrics, “There is power, there is power, in a band of working men”, I originally sang John McCutcheon’s version which says “There is power, there is power, working women, working men.”, which rhymes with “when we stand, hand in hand”, “must rule in every land”, and “industrial union grand”. However, after the show I received complaints from some non gender conforming audiences members who requested that I change it to “There is power in a band of working folx”. I ended up preserving the rhyme and avoiding future complaints by singing “band of working friends”. In another gender example, the song “Union Maid” as sung today almost always excludes Woody Guthrie’s original final verse advising women to marry a union man and join the lady’s auxiliary, and most singers add a feminist verse in its place. Several options for this verse exist. I’ve also seen people object strenuously to the verse of Bread and Roses that goes “As we go marching, marching, we battle too for men, for they are women’s children, and we mother them again”.
In a number of cases, I have been asked to remove the verse of Solidarity Forever which begins “It is we who plowed the prairies, built the cities where they trade”, because audiences felt the verse was colonial. I’ve preferred to keep that verse in, because I don’t see changing the verse and not mentioning settlement as doing anything to actually restore Native people’s land rights. As with Union Maid, Solidarity Forever is often sung with a feminist or diversity based verse added, and again there are several ones bouncing around that people often put in there.
There are some songs I’ll sing in shows at coffee houses or Irish pubs or so on that I won’t sing in activist meetings- for example, Lakes of Pontchartrain, which is not racist but which raises some people’s hackles over the use of the word “creole” and the standard folk song “guy asking a woman he’s just met to marry him” trope. Another example is a song of mine written about sex trafficking of indigenous women in Minnesota, which was written on request from an anti-trafficking activist and which most audiences take as a strong call to action on a serious problem. But, there’s always the danger of playing it in a set for some activist group and sparking a huge controversy over sex work discourse. It’s been criticized for showing the trafficked women as victims and not discussing how empowering and valid sex work is, which was a criticism that struck me as completely missing the point of a song that opens on the image of a murdered human trafficking victim and isn’t about the kind of sex work people speak of as empowering.
Note that it’s not only in activist or labor spaces that people might change or update old songs. I know a couple of people who perform “Tam Lin” and take pains to make the sex that Margaret has with Tam Lin to be consensual, not the [rape it is often portrayed as.](https://tam-lin.org/analysis/Tam_Lin_and_rape.html) Many Irish trad musicians might choose to sing Blackjack Davey or some other version of that ballad instead of the versions with names like Seven Yellow Gypsies, and I suspect that the reason you hear “Go Move Shift” more often than “Thirty Foot Trailer” has a lot to do with people not wanting to sing the several dated or offensive terms in the chorus of Thirty Foot Trailer, with both of these being songs protesting the mistreatment of Irish Travelers. Murder ballads are a contentious issue among many folk singers, with some avoiding them because they’re overwhelmingly stories of domestic violence and the killing of women. Personally, I think it’s important to keep them alive as ballads, especially as many were collected by folk music researchers from women, and there’s a modern trend of women folk musicians writing new murder ballads like “Caleb Meyer”, which are often about self defense from rape or domestic violence. So, these political concerns are definitely not only there for people who are playing activist benefit shows and meetings.
One thing that I’ve done in the past is use the melodies of racist songs and write new, anti-racist lyrics to them. For example, I worked with a black bandmate to write a song about Harriet Tubman, which she sang over the tune of “paddyroller”, also known as “Run [N-word] Run”. In another case, I took the tune of a minstrel show song about Irish/Italian competition for jobs (Last Winter Was a Hard One) and turned it into a song about a famous strike that happened in our city.
Good question. I’d say nah it’s down to intent
To be honest, I listen to whatever I want if I like it, and I expect others to behave similarly.
Eh…not really. Our whole country has a racist background in some ways, at a certain point you’re throwing the baby out with the bathwater and erasing history.
On the other hand I can’t imagine sitting around listening to that kind of song, it’s just not my thing from a strictly musical standpoint, so it’s not really a dilemma that has any bearing on my daily life.
Are the bands that wrote the version being sung and perform the songs using black face themselves? Same answer.
It depends on the lyrics of the song.
I don’t believe in deleting songs from history. It’s right up there with taking Huckleberry Finn from library shelves because it contains the N-word. Or Lolita because it is written from the perspective of a sexual predator.
The problem with the premise? From now until doomsday, we will be constantly taking out important cultural artifacts just because they offend somebody, somewhere. Art is supposed to challenge you.
I think it’s in poor taste to use “y’all” because that’s Reb talk.
No. Our history is our history. Good or bad.